Telcos today make most of their money from voice-centric communications, and various VoIP reincarnations are in play too. Will the telcos be able to shift to presence-centric systems that take advantage of the flexibility of the stupid network?
Well, I’m currently experiencing a very sad non-telco example of how even the best of old companies can fail to transition to a digital world. I’ll share it with you, if you don’t mind.
For many years I’ve been a loyal Economist subscriber. When they launched the web site they gave free access to print subscribers. Over time I’ve found myself reading ever more on-line, and having less time for the print version. Apart from anything I’m often away from home on work or pleasure, and they just pile up and become too much to catch up with.
So as my subscription was up for renewal I thought I’d stick their RSS feed into Bloglines and give up the print edition in favour of the online version.
Oh, woe is me.
There’s just lots of details that are wrong. Today is publication day when the paper presses roll. So I get splatted with 80 articles in my RSS feed in one go. There’s no categorisation. No personalisation. The summaries are often a bit too skimpy to know whether I should read the article. No full feeds of articles — not even one ones published in full for free on the Web. No embedded links to related articles — in-house or otherwise.
So the Economist’s editorial role isn’t making as good a transition to the Web as I’d like. Newsgathering and comment isn’t enough on its own to meet the customer’s need. (Hah! SIP and ENUM on their own aren’t enough…)
But holy cow they’ve screwed up one thing. I’m looking at a serious article and there’s a Flash-based ad for Xerox on the right with a graphic of a sweeping sonar. And get this — it pings aloud three times about every ten seconds. Repeatedly. Forever. All I can say to the Economist is
WHAT THE **** ARE YOU THINKING?!?!?!
How dare you treat a paying subscriber this way. It’s just totally offensive. It tells me that I’m being treated as eyeball fodder for some crappy marketing schtick, and you don’t see excellence in journalism as your reason for being.
Your values have been corrupted. Fix them.
Now I hope they can pull this round. I don’t see dead trees being the medium of choice for anyone much in 5-10 years from now. I’d like to see the Economist prosper.
Poor distribution technology still leaves hard reporage and editorial tasks. Someone’s got to do them, ‘cos I’m willing to pay for them.
But all traditional telephony has to offer is distribution of your voice over a distance. There isn’t anything else behind the curtain. Get your distribution elsewhere and there’s nothing left to disintermediate. And the values of the telco — wring the customer dry — don’t fit the new world.
I reckon the last ever phone call will be from a telemarketer.
And it’ll be to the wrong number.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:45 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/451.
While it obviously doesn't fix their values or otherwise affect the underlying causes for this misery, you could save some nerves by using Firefox with AdBlock (http://adblock.mozdev.org/) - at least it gets rid of the Xerox ads.
But I definately agree with the general point - no one (least of all a paying subscriber) should not be inconvenienced with a bad user interface.